Nancy Andreasen offers four suggestions to which you should allocate 30 minutes a day — choose a new and unfamiliar area of knowledge and explore it in depth, spend some time meditating or just thinking, practise observing and describing things, and practise imagining. This is quite a punishing workout but it makes perfect sense and, unlike the Nintendo DS, it does seem to describe a better way of life.

Ian Robertson, professor of psychology at Trinity College, Dublin, suggests reading out loud at breakfast, making lists of related objects (say, yellow ones, or those beginning with A), and change hands — brush your teeth with your left hand if you’re right-handed. Again, this makes perfect sense: these tricks make your brain deal with the unfamiliar as opposed to getting locked in old patterns of thought.

I had problems with an F5D8051 USB stick saying “No wireless networks found” and generally dropping the wireless network. This after trying the driver CD that came with the card and also the latest driver download from the Belkin website.

After googling and reading a few forums this is what worked for me (Windows XP SP3)

At Gore - a $2.4bn, hi-tech materials company that most people know best for the Gore-Tex fabric that waterproofs their anoraks and walking boots - no one can tell any of the company’s 8,500 associates what to do. Although there is a structure (divisions, business units and so on) there is no organisation chart, no hierarchy and therefore no bosses. Kelly is one of the few with a title.

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Similarly, Gore doesn’t have budgets in the sense that most companies do. ‘When I joined we didn’t have a planning process - budgeting wasn’t in the vocabulary,’ she says. Gore now does a better job of planning investment and forecasting, she maintains, but it still tries to avoid the games-playing and inflexibility of the traditional budget. ‘Budgets hinder associates from reacting in real time to changing circumstances,’ she says.

Hawes’s Kafka is a canny, funny, worldly man who liked to relax by socialising with his many friends, visiting the occasional prostitute - and reading porn. The fact that Kafka subscribed to two erotic journals is presented as a grand revelation: ‘No one has ever shown his readers what we are about to see: Kafka’s porn.’ There follow some pretty weird pen-and-ink drawings, fin de siècle in style, although Hawes also admits that ‘Kafka’s porn is no real secret. The mystery is that it should seem like one.’ This aspect of the book has caused a furious row to erupt among German-speaking Kafka scholars, with several accusing Hawes of sensationalisation, prudishness and even anti-Semitism.

“Terrorism, radicalisation, climate change, energy - these are the biggest security threats nowadays and they are not something Nato can do much about. It doesn’t have an answer,” said an EU official, who wished not to be named.

Born in 1949, Nato’s original function and purpose was to keep the Soviet Union at bay and keep the Americans in Europe. But in recent years the alliance has suffered from strategic confusion while morphing into a very different organisation. Nato has become a global gendarme, fighting wars far away from its “North Atlantic” core, peacekeeping, and expanding civilian control of the military in new democracies through its policy of admitting countries from the Balkans and the former eastern bloc.

The cranes are still working in Reykjavik, building the opera house and seafront luxury flats, but no one is sure if they will be occupied. The imported Range Rovers now filling car lots waiting to be shipped and sold abroad have been nicknamed “Game Overs”. The blaze of light at night — geothermal energy is cheap — makes the capital look like a city of several million, but the traffic lights in the new financial district change for half an hour at a time without a car passing.

Yet for all that Mad Men has tapped into the current zeitgeist and, for all that it is loved by advertisers (in a way that perhaps only a programmes about advertising could be), its ratings remain tiny in comparison to the major network dramas such as House or CSI. On average, only 1.5 million people watch Mad Men, although the second season finale was seen by 2.9 million, a jump of 89 per cent on the previous series.

This might not be such a bad thing. The first series of Mad Men was a grower (the second series has not yet been shown in the UK, the Beeb is currently reprising the first series), but even The Wire with its team of writers could not hold up for more than four series (the fifth series bordered on slapstick for periods).